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MIT Builds An Open-Source Platform For Your Body

Siberian temperatures. Eleven grueling days, navigating rough terrain. Six teams, matched for talent, competing for glory at the end. The Iditarod? Nah, just the annual MIT Health and Wellness Hackathon.

This isn’t your average social app-fest. The goal is to jump-start an open source platform where apps that track all different aspects of your bodily health can exchange information. It’s a Sisyphean task, since most digital health solutions today are trapped in silos, but the organizers believe they can change that by enfranchising big companies instead of trying to disrupt them.

To unify the segmented market for health technology takes heavy lifting on the engineering side, since much of the progress made by private companies hasn’t been shared back to the community. Here, each team is required to use open source and open standard tools so that things work together seamlessly: specifically, the Lab’s patient-centered CollaboRhythm platform and theIndivo X system for personalized health records.